Words Whispered in Water. Sandy Rosenthal
mini-vacation and a “let’s make the best of this” attitude had turned into a bona fide evacuation with fear and anxiety. One small blessing in this hotel was that our two boys had a room of their own, and Steve and I were lucky enough to get one of the hotel’s few rooms with a tiny kitchenette.
After waiting over an hour for the single, coin-operated washer and dryer, we drove to Shoney’s for some dinner. We spoke little. Our eyes and everyone else’s were fixated on the television high in a corner of the busy restaurant. There was nothing new, only the same reports over and over. We drove back to the Drury Inn and climbed the stairs to the fourth floor. Walking down the hall, we could hear the sharp bark of our very yappy wiener dog.
Steve and I settled down with Grandma Rose and Scott to watch television, hoping for something different from the hurricane-racked region. Then we got the most shocking news of our lives. The levees had broken, the “bowl” was filling, and the City of New Orleans was going underwater. And that wasn’t all; stories told of chaos at the convention center, looters at One Canal Place shopping mall, and “marauding black youths” walking down St. Charles Avenue and breaking into each house, one by one.
We did not know it yet, but our house—six feet above sea level along the Mississippi River—was high and dry. We also did not know that the reports of looters were exaggerated. Nonetheless, the night of August 30 was tearful for everyone. We all thought of the city and those still in New Orleans. Would the city come back? How many had died?
Steve and I walked from Grandma Rose’s hotel room on the third floor to our sons’ shared room on the second floor to tell them this terrible news. But they already knew because they were watching the same news reports. Of course they were. For a while, we just sat together, saying nothing. After asking them if there was anything they needed, we said good night, and shuffled back to our room. Unlike when we arrived in Jackson, I was too numb to unpack, too numb to do anything except watch the news reports on CNN over and over before falling into the first of countless uneasy nights’ sleep.
Chapter
Early in the morning on August 31, 2005—two days after the floodwalls broke—Harvey Miller awoke to someone yelling in front of the house. It was a man in a tiny canoe, paddling with a kitchen broom. He told Harvey that two neighbors a few houses away had chopped their way out of their attic and that he had canoed them both to safety. The neighbors had made him promise to return and get the Millers. Harvey eyed the tiny canoe. Renee did not know how to swim, and this looked just too dangerous. He asked Canoe-man if he could send someone back with a larger boat. Reluctantly, Harvey watched him broom-paddle away.
***
On most mornings before the 2005 flood, I woke up slowly, cherishing that warm, comfortable place next to my husband. But on Wednesday (August 31), in a hard bed at the Drury Inn, I snapped to full-blown awake as though someone had thrown ice water on me. I would wake up like that every day in the coming months.
Few people can viscerally comprehend surviving a catastrophe that claims not just an entire neighborhood but hundreds of neighborhoods in the space of a few hours. The scope of the disaster was now becoming apparent as images of men, women, and children standing on rooftops flashed across the videosphere. These people had lost much more than their homes and all their contents. They also lost their places of worship, their favorite stores, their doctors’ offices, and their hospital. Many lost a car. They might have lost the plants and foliage they loved to tend that were destroyed in the briny gulf water.
The 2005 flood also affected their parents, their sisters, and their brothers. Too many had lost loved ones. When the counting was over, the catastrophe had claimed the lives of 1,577 people in Louisiana, including 1,300 directly due to flooding or wind according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).29 The number rises to 2,000 when you include the trauma of relocation, illness, and suicide.30
Everyone who got through the trauma managed it differently. Some worked nonstop; some cried nonstop. During these dark days, I leaped out of bed because of the long list of things that needed to be done. What about people who were depending on me? I was now living in a different city. Every waking moment, I focused on caring for the needs of my two sons and little dog which pulled my attention away from the radio’s depressing (and often wrong) information slowing oozing out of the city. It would take months before anyone knew the full scope of the flood disaster, and it would be years before those responsible would be identified. But on Wednesday—two days after the floodwalls broke—we clung together, often silently soaking up every bit of news we could find. None of it was encouraging.
The storm had passed north of the city, and surge levels had dropped, but water continued to flow through breached levees fed by the swollen Lake Pontchartrain just to the north. Water also flowed into neighboring suburban Jefferson Parish to the east. Floodwaters equalized with the lake and reached their highest point around midday on Wednesday. The news reported that it would be months before New Orleans could be drained—another falsehood. Responsibility for the lack of reliable information falls squarely on FEMA, and it may have been FEMA’s single most egregious crime. Here’s why.
A FEMA team, led by Phil Parr, had helicoptered into the Superdome at noon on Tuesday (August 30). Parr had expected to work out of Red October—a high-tech, mobile communications center with thirty computer workstations on the back of a tractor trailer. Its satellite phones and internet capability could have provided a makeshift network and allowed first responders to communicate, something literally worth life and death.31 But Red October was still a six-hour drive away in Shreveport because two people had ordered it—Phil Parr and Michael Brown—and the request was countermanded by FEMA headquarters.32 Now it was too late to get it to the Superdome due to the water and debris, and Parr’s job was irrelevant. Imagine how different it could have been with Red October for police and first-responder rescue teams! So many people could have been saved. And it would have damped many of the rampant, ridiculous rumors.
The summer of 2005 should be the last time in history that an entire metropolitan area is cut off from the rest of humanity.
***
In this unreal world, Renee and Harvey were still trapped in their two-story safe house. Several hours after Harvey had declined help from Canoe-man, Harvey became angry. For days now, he had been watching while his neighborhood disintegrated and their clean water supply ran low.
“This is ridiculous!” he said aloud. “Why is no one coming for us?”
So he stripped to his shorts, descended the stairs into the cold water, and swam out the front door. Large, speckled trout surrounded him and traveled alongside him as he breast-stroked to his house on Charlotte Drive. Harvey had to see for himself if everything in his home was gone.
Then he saw a helicopter and started to splash and yell, “HELP!”
The helicopter’s strong wake threatened to drown him, so he swam to an oak tree and wrapped his arms around a thick branch. The helicopter flew away.
Clinging to the tree, Harvey shook his fist and yelled, “Why is this happening to me?”
Months later, on a trip back to the city, Harvey would see that the oak branch, to which he had clung three days after the floodwall broke, was easily twelve feet above the ground.
***
As Wednesday morning became afternoon, the Rosenthal family continued to do what every evacuated family did: focus on the most basic things in life. Where will we work? Where will the children go to school? And, after those first two things were decided, where will we live?
Our first priority was finding office space for my husband’s company to operate, which also included me. I did the outreach marketing for the company with a specialty in copywriting. We still did not know the condition of the office on Edenborn Avenue in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie. Nor did we know which employees had flooded homes.